My mother’s ashes weigh more than you would expect. I’ve been carrying them around the city in an orange nylon shopping bag. Bringing her with me to cafes, shops, even the Robbie Burns Room in the Mitchell Library. Waiting for the right moment. The perfect place to scatter them.

There are a few possibilities. One is Blythswood Square, a grassy quadrangle atop a hill in the city’s west end, where I’m sitting now enjoying the view; another is the Georgian building around the corner on Bath Street.

The day after I arrived in Glasgow, I’d stood on Bath opposite the Moskito Bar & Bites, watching the sun turn the building’s sandstone walls to honey, then taken the worn stone steps down to the bar, running my hand along the glossy black railing. Thinking of other feet and other hands on the same smooth surfaces.

“Are you here for a wee bite to eat?” the young server asked me. “It’s just that lunches aren’t quite ready yet.”

I looked at her and felt the ground shift under me, as though I were on an elevator that suddenly dropped a floor. I had to reach out to support myself against the zinc bar top.

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“Are you all right?” she asked, stepping into the light and revealing an eyebrow piercing and arms covered in elaborate sleeve tattoos. I saw that she was taller, her hair a shade darker, but she had the same blue eyes and lightly freckled skin.

“I’m fine now,” I said. “For a minute there I thought I saw a ghost.”

“Oh, well Scotland’s full of ghosts,” she said.

She watched me run my eyes around the empty room and asked if I was meeting someone.

“No,” I said, “there’s just me.” And though I hadn’t planned on it, I told her that my mother once lived here.

“Right here, in the bar? That’s brilliant!” she said and pulled me further inside. “Go on, then, have a wee look around.”

It was hard to imagine the slick, minimalist room having been my mother’s home. The four-storey domed building, which houses the Moskito on the ground floor and real estate offices upstairs, was originally an insurance company called the Glasgow Friendly Society. My mother’s father was the building caretaker and the ground-floor apartment, set partly below grade, was where she lived with her family until she got married.

I stood at the barred window looking out onto the stairwell, with its sideways steps down to the door and stone wall topped by decorative iron railings, watching the legs of pedestrians scissor by above my head. Ten years earlier, I’d brought my mother to Glasgow to a last visit. It was a year since my father had died, and a few months after we got her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. On the plane on the way back to Toronto, she’d grabbed my hand during takeoff and started to cry softly, then made me promise to bring her back home when she was gone.

On our last day, we’d taken the bus from my aunt’s house in a suburb south of the city where we were staying into town to revisit the old neighbourhood. We missed our stop and ended up at the People’s Palace Museum, where my mother spent the entire time hunched inside a replica air-raid shelter listening to the whine of bombers. After I managed to pry her away, we made our way back to the Moskito for lunch. The minute we sat down, she became agitated and started reading the menu out loud — “Prawn cocktail. . . Black pudding fritter. . . Lasagna and chips. . . ” until I took her hand and calmed her quietly by humming a lullaby she used to sing to me when I was a child.

“Do you recognize anything, Mom?” I’d asked her.

She looked at me like she wasn’t sure who I was, then shifted her eyes to a spot behind my left shoulder, where the server stood beside the cash desk looking out the window.

“Over there,” she’d said, “where that girl is. That was our kitchen. The big porcelain sink was right underneath that window.”

And then she told me a story I hadn’t heard before.

It was a summer morning, after breakfast, and she was doing the washing up with the window cranked wide open to let in the breeze. She took off her engagement ring for safe keeping and put it on the stone sill like she always did. While she was scrubbing the porridge pot, her thoughts miles away, a raven swooped down, snatched the ring in its beak and flew away with it.

There are no ravens in Blythswood Square today. It’s the first warm day since I landed in Glasgow two weeks ago, one of those rare luminous days when the grass is such a vivid green it vibrates. Office workers on their lunch break sprawl on the grass, dark jackets peeled off, pants rolled up and skirts hiked to get some sun. They’re plugged in to iPods and Smartphones or yakking about who got the drunkest at last night’s hen party. A group of children from the daycare is having a picnic beside a flower bed full of cheerful annuals lined up like little soldiers. One small girl has the same name as me; she’s been cheeky and the caregiver is reprimanding her. She’s about the age I was when we left Scotland.

As my mother’s disease progressed, she returned here in her mind, thought she was still a young woman living on Bath Street with her family. Most days when I would arrive to visit her at the nursing home, she’d tell me that it was time to take her dog, Charlie, to the square for his walk. He likes to do his business by the alder trees, she’d say, as I pushed her around the nearby park.

The broad-leafed trees that formed a dense, protective all around Blythswood Square in my mother’s day have died or been cut down. Except for one lone alder standing across from the new boutique hotel. From where I’m sitting under it, I can see all the way down to the River Clyde and the turbine ballet of the Whitelee Windfarm.

I reach into my bag for the egg and cucumber sandwich I bought at Brafords, the bakery my mother used to go to for macaroons, and my hand brushes the box that contains my mother’s ashes. It’s hand-carved from sandalwood and inlaid with ivory petals, and still retains a faint spicy smell. The box was my mother’s most treasured possession, a gift that arrived by post from Burma near the end of the war. I run my fingers over the petal-shaped indentations, can feel the hollows where my mother’s tears would have gathered.

Across the square, the server from the Moskito is playing frisbee with a young man and a small brown dog. She looks very pretty in a floral sundress that flutters around her legs. The dog is bouncing up and down like it’s spring-loaded, yelping with pleasure. She sees me watching them and waves.

Before leaving the bar that first time, I’d told her I had my mother’s ashes with we, that I’d brought her back to be scattered on home soil.

Her pale brow puckered, the way my mother’s would when she was thinking. Then she said, “If we had a wee garden here, that would be great, but you can’t just be leaving her on the bare stones.”

I shut my eyes and imagine my mother strolling around through the square on a summer evening, when the light still clings to the sky at ten o’clock, arm-in-arm with her fiancé. Stopping under a tree and leaning her head back for a kiss. Maybe letting him slip his warm hand inside the bodice of her dress. Only taking her eyes off him to glance down at her ring finger and all it promised.

When I was sorting out my mother’s apartment for the move to the nursing home, I found a crumpled photograph of my mother and a grinning, curly-haired man with “Hugh and I at Dunoon, July 1939” written on the back. I asked her about him but she only looked vague and said, “Who?” Then she grabbed the photograph and tore it into little pieces, flung them across the room like a handful of confetti.

I only found out about Hugh McCartney next week, when I was visiting my aunt to drop off a silver pin my mother wanted her to have. She told me he was a welder who’d come down from Inverness to work in the shipyards. That my mother met him at church dance just before the new year. How he’d scooped her up and spun her across the polished planks, her full skirt swirling round her, around and around, until the minister turned off the lights.

“He was the love of your mother’s life,” my aunt said. And then she told me the rest of the story.

Afterwards, I’d wandered around the city, pausing at my mother’s favourite haunts — the pantomime theatre where they used to go on Saturday afternoon, the sparkly ballroom dance hall in the city centre — places I’d always imagined my parents together. Nothing looked the same, it was as if someone had taken an eraser and rubbed my father out of the picture, leaving a smudge where he should have been.

I wonder who would have come down the stone steps of the Moskito with the news. Hugh’s mother? His younger brother? My mother might have been standing at the kitchen window when the knock came on the door, rubbing the empty place on her finger, worrying about how she was going to tell Hugh about the ring when he came home from the war. But guessing that he’d probably laugh it away. Then opening the door, seeing the face and the hand holding the telegram. And known.

I’ve decided to scatter her ashes here in the square, underneath the alder tree. That way I can always come back and sit with her. Share the view of the Clyde. Keep her company as she stands day after day looking down the hill to the docks where Hugh shipped out. I’ll empty the contents of the sandalwood box into my hand. Fling out my arm, open my fingers and let her go. Maybe sing a little tune: “I’m going home to Glasgow, its face is on my mind/Its laugh is loud and gallus, its arms are warm and kind/I need tae feel the ground underneath my feet/And hear the Glasgow sounds in the people that I meet.”

“Och, gies some, willya Willie?” A lumpy woman in a man’s shirt and lime green stretch pants is trying to grab a bottle away from a skinny man with a big belly. They’re grappling with it as they stagger toward me.

“Nah, git ye ane, it’s awe mine,” he says, shoving her away with his shoulder. She wobbles and rocks, then falls backwards onto the grass beside me and holds out her hand.

“Dinnie gie her nuthin, she’s a stupit wee slag,” the man says, taking another slug from the bottle.

The woman sticks her tongue out at him, then pulls herself up, tucks in her shirt and stumbles after him.

Thick clouds are blowing in from the Firth, laying a pattern of bruises across the sky. A few metres away, a girl of about ten sits on a bench spoon-feeding her brother in his stroller, while her mothers reads today’s Herald, whose headline screams: “300th British soldier dies in Afghanistan.” The little boy’s mouth opens at the touch of the spoon and then closes around it, opening and closing like a ravenous baby bird’s, until the small glass jar is emptied.

Near the end, we had to feed my mother baby food. I’d sit on a stool beside her in the nursing home, pressing a spoonful of pureed chicken to her closed lips. Coaxing her to eat, just one spoonful, while she’d yell, “Who are you? Get away from me!” and knock the spoon flying out of my hand.

The square shimmers like a desert mirage, and I reach over to get a tissue from my carrier bag. Grab onto a handful of grass instead. Where my bag was, there’s nothing but an indentation in the lawn. I jump up and look around, wondering what I could have done with it, then realize what’s happened. Try to catch sight of the drunk couple, half expecting to see them trotting down the hill toward the crowds on Sauchiehall Street, my orange bag swinging from the man’s arm. But there’s no sign of them; they’ve vanished.

The air has gone still, the way things get before a storm. The lunch crowd has headed back to work, the daycare kids off for their afternoon nap. The baby is sleeping, a trickle of yellow drool running down his chin. His sister lies stretched out on her back, chewing on a blade of grass. Across the square, underneath a sign that says Enter At Your Own Risk, the Moskito server and her boyfriend are dancing, eyes closed, plugged together into an iPod. A sudden gust lifts her skirt up around her like a flowery parachute. She tries to beat it down, laughing, her face buried in his neck. Lost in the moment. Oblivious to the first stinging drops of rain.

Lesley McAllister is the Toronto author of one book of poetry and two works of fiction. Her short stories, poetry, travel writing and journalism have appeared in anthologies, literary magazines, newspapers and on CBC radio.

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